TO ACHIEVE the title of First Lady of Fleet Street, which Lynda Lee-Potter was not alone in having bestowed upon her, a woman journalist in the late 20th century required little more than the willingness of her bosses to promote her as such — and to pay her and the people she interviewed lavish sums of money.

The Daily Mail, which had pioneered the female opinion column in the 1960s with Anne Scott-James, managed to turn the personally diffident Lee-Potter into a phenomenally on-the-ball columnist by these aggressive means. She obliged them by emerging as a competition-beating, thoroughly professional and much parodied pontificatrix. Being one of those columnists with interchangeable thoughts on whether Hollywood’s new boy was sexy, or Princess Y was getting too skinny, she was undoubtedly among the sisterhood which became the collective prototype of Private Eye’s Glenda Slagg. But her fundamental commonsense views, alternately pleasing and enraging to Middle England, made her one of the few names who, plugged on the front page, could help to sell newspapers.

Apart from giving her the weekly column, the Mail made her into the mistress of the extended interview. If a provincial housewife was bereft of her family after a gruesome mass murder, if a couple were keeping vigil over a dying infant, if a first wife wanted to reveal, in painful detail, the failings of her newly remarried husband, or a fading star could be tempted to spill the beans about his drugs shame or his booze hell, Lee-Potter would be at the fireside or the bedside, tape-recorder at the ready, lending a sympathetic ear.

Her easy, formless readability and her ability to fill acres of space — often a whole series of articles, not a mere double-page spread — were legendary. As the rest of Fleet Street knew, the Daily Mail’s ever-open chequebook — rather than her skills in tracking down the necessary victim — could pave the way for these tell-all confessions. Lee-Potter ensured that they got their money’s worth.

Yet she remained, in person, a sweetly self-deprecating personality who, unlike her predecessor and subsequent Express rival Jean Rook — another product of the northern working-class — was loath to trumpet her powers. Small and round, with strikingly feline features, a high voice and a permanent disarming smile, she struck those who met her on reporting jobs in the late 1960s as utterly lacking in confidence, with an air of being anxious to please. Journalism was something she fell into by chance.

Born Lynda Higginson in Leigh, a mining village in Lancashire, in 1935, she first aspired to be an actress. “I got on the train at Warrington Bank Quay station with a Lancashire acccent, and got off at Euston without it,” she was fond of saying. After the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she was appearing in Dry Rot, a Whitehall farce with Brian Rix, when she met Jeremy Lee-Potter, a medical student at Guy’s Hospital. They married in 1957 and lived for a while in a basement room while he was a £350-a-year houseman. He claimed that he had blighted her acting career by the demands of his job, as he served as medical officer with the RAF in Aden while their three children were young. But she found that she could write little stories and read them on the radio, which opened up her new career. And his own rise in haematology to consultant surgeon (and chairman of the British Medical Association) together with her vastly increased earning power, ensured that one day they would inhabit a more comfortable, indeed a palatial home.

The late David English, creator of the Daily Mail as we know it, was her mentor. Lynda Lee-Potter had arrived from Woman’s Mirror to be a feature writer on the Mail in 1967 when she was telephoned one day and asked to come in and do a column after Rook decamped to the Express. She obliged, and carried on obliging (“With my fingers on the keyboard my mind clears and opinions form themselves”) for 27 years.

The targets of her personal remarks tended to be soft, and obvious, ie, celebs. She could say what she damn well liked about the “greedy, vulgar” wedding of Grant Bovey and Anthea Turner; accuse the Beckhams of having “turned freeloading into a fine art” or Jerry Hall of having “about as much sexual allure as a plastic doll”. Sarah Macaulay and Princess Anne were “frumpy”.

When she joined in the debate about whether Diana, Princess of Wales, had cellulite, Paul Dacre, then Mail Editor, wrote of how the Princess had telephoned him and said: “I’ve just seen your Ms Lee-Potter in Marks & Spencer, and I bet she’s got cellulite!” But of course, after the Princess’s death, Lee-Potter recanted all her criticisms and wrote, “She made a difference to sad lives.” If the subject were lately dead, it was even simpler: Robin Day had been “vain, irascible, unreasonable, fundamentally a bully”.

When her remarks made readers squirm, such as those about Mo Mowlam’s appearance, shortly before it was revealed that Mowlam had undergone chemotherapy after her brain tumour, she was quick to apologise. In print, she could flirt wheedlingly with potential interviewees: she had only to mention that she was looking forward to the new Jeffrey Archer novel, she reported, for the said novel to arrive, with a bottle of champagne and a hamper.

Though she could not be said to have a writing style, other than getting it all down, transcribing every single quote, and stirring up the results in no particular order, she did this with commendable efficiency and managed to extract some telling soundbites from her subjects. These she made good use of when in 2000 she published Class Act: How to beat the British Class System. The book was an opportunity to disseminate her observations of the still yawning class divide in modern Britain. Having herself left behind a cosy, hospitable 1930s working-class home, where a cup of tea was always brewing for visitors, she had discovered that her fiancé’s parents, Air Marshal Sir Patrick and Lady Lee-Potter, never offered people refreshment except at meal-times.

Interviewing celebrities at home, she could observe how they deployed their nouveau richesse: Les Dawson’s candelabra, statues and table groaning with silverware; the popocracy’s fondness for heavy gold jewellery and perma-tans. She excoriated tacky toffs (eg, Woodrow Wyatt) and the giveaway signs of middle-classness (eg, bragging about children’s exam results).

Her own Edwardian house, Palladian in style, tucked away in Dorset and invisible to any prying eye, sports a fine collection of paintings, and french doors opening on to a York stone terrace and a vista of lawns and yew hedges (designed by a friend of Gertrude Jekyll) leading to acres of orderly woodland, tennis court and swimming pool — a monument to Lee-Potter’s faultless taste, acquired along with a highly developed set of antennae for the show off accoutrements of so many of her subjects. It was a testimony to her industry and success, her husband said, that their three children had all chosen to follow their mother into writing, rather than his family profession of medicine.

She was appointed OBE in 1998, and won many journalism awards, the judges citing her “amazing ability to pick up on what a lot of people were thinking”. Her final contribution to the Daily Mail — on May 15, when she was apparently recovering from her own brain tumour — was a moving interview with Gloria Hunniford about the death from cancer of her daughter Caron Keating. And in her final column, a few weeks earlier, she had written: “Anyone else hate the phrase ‘How are you?’ Invariably, it suggests the questioner knows something unsettling about us that we haven’t yet heard. Certainly, it always rattles me.”

She is survived by her husband, their two daughters and their son.

Lynda Lee-Potter, OBE, columnist, was born on May 2, 1935. She died on October 20, 2004, aged 69.